Unstructured Data 2: The Rising Tide of Unstructured Data

In the first post of this series, I called out the elephant in the room: unstructured data. It makes up the majority of enterprise information, yet is often invisible to leaders - and thus, often avoided.

Today, I want to look at how that elephant grew so large - the rising tide that feeds it.

A Tide That Won't Stop Rising

Unstructured data is at the core of our working lives. While structured systems run the business, we are constantly creating, sharing, and storing unstructured information. Every Teams ping, email thread, shared drive folder, or Zoom recording adds to it.

And it is relentless.

By 2025, unstructured data already accounts for over 90% of business information (Athento, 2025). IDC forecasts global data volume reaching 181 zettabytes this year, with the vast majority unstructured (DemandSage, 2025). Nearly 90% of that remains "dark data" - stored but never used (TechRadar, 2025).

What was once a manageable file share is now a multi-petabyte estate. And unlike structured data in systems of record, this tide spreads across dozens of apps and silos, beyond the reach of traditional governance. Out of sight, out of mind.

Why It Keeps Rising

1. Collaboration Explosion
2. Low Barriers to Creation
3. Culture of "Keep Everything"
4. AI Readiness Pressure

What the Rising Tide Means

Every part of the business feels the impact:

• Business & Finance feel the cost of storage and backup as estates swell.
• ICT feels the operational strain: migrations, outages, and ballooning infrastructure bills.
• Risk & Compliance feel unease as sensitive data is swept along, often unnoticed.
• Strategy & AI Leaders see the promise of Copilot or Gemini, but know that if the tide is full of ROT, AI will surface that too.

This is the dangerous truth: the tide is rising across every part of the business, yet no one group owns the responsibility for managing it. Content creators? Data owners? Platform owners? Risk managers? Everyone touches it, but no one governs it.

The Metaphor That Matters

Think of it this way:

• A trickle can be ignored.
• A flood demands attention.
• A tide never stops.

Unstructured data is that tide. Left unmanaged, it rises relentlessly, seeping into every corner of the organisation. The elephant we identified in the first post in this series didn't appear overnight - it was fed by years of rising waters.

What We Can Do

We can't hold back the tide entirely. Collaboration, communication, and digital creation are the lifeblood of modern work. But we can:

• Build smarter levees: retention policies, classification, and lifecycle rules.
• Drain the swamps: disposing of ROT and duplicates to reduce volume.
• Channel the flow: directing high-value data into governed repositories where AI can generate real insight.

These are not easy tasks, but they are achievable - and each step lowers the water level.

What next? Hidden Depths

In the next post, we'll look at what's lurking beneath the surface - the skeletons in the closet hidden in this tide: sensitive information, contracts, and personal data that AI will surface whether we're ready or not.

Call to Action

Tell me, where is the rising tide felt most strongly in your organisation - endless chat threads, forgotten file shares, oversharing, or ballooning cloud storage bills.

Photo by Ray Bilcliff: Pexel